


i want to love first and live incidentally

by postcardmystery



Category: Historical RPF
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, F/M, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:49:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He loves you,” says the man whose heart she’s sure her husband stole, and she tightens her hand on the stem of her glass, says, “I don’t remember askin’ you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	i want to love first and live incidentally

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for mental illness (bipolar disorder), self-harm, and suicide.

Cities bow to them, and this is how it starts.

This is the Jazz Age, and if it is not named for them, it is because of them, all the same. The world watches, a curl in her hair and smirks identical and nasty on the faces of both her boys. A Generation kneels to them, and does not ask. She never cleans out her mouth, keeps her mouth red and slanted and Alabama tumbles from it like rich, dark wine. It does not matter where they go, it does not matter where they go--

\--this is a truth which will return to haunt them, in time.

 

 

“He loves you,” says the man whose heart she’s sure her husband stole, and she tightens her hand on the stem of her glass, says, “I don’t remember askin’ you.”

“Doll,” says the man her husband calls _H_ in his increasingly desperate letters, “You didn’t _have_ to ask.”

 

 

She’s too beautiful, and the world is too small. She rips and roars through men like wildfire, and they bore her and she never bores them, and she’s bored, she’s so bored, and the town gets smaller and smaller, and she dances, wears dresses no good girl ever wears, waits for her one-way ticket out of this hell-hole. It comes in the shape of a thin, handsome man, and she closes her hand around the crystal of her glass, smiles coy and bright, asks her Daddy who he is.

She laughs about it later, _a country club_ , so bourgeoisie, and she never meant to be a muse, meant to carve the world to suit her and no one would ever accuse her of standing too still, of not leaving chaos in her wake, but the man she did not choose to love takes her hand, whispers _my golden girl_ into the hair she wears to match him, knows that the best sort of freedom is that for which you never had to ask.

 

 

“She’s a looker,” says H, throwing back his whisky, “But she has crazy written all over her, old boy.”

“Because, of course, you are an _expert_ in crazy,” says Fitgerald, and they watch Zelda dance and dance and dance, do not move when H says, “Been told it often enough by now, that’s damn sure.”

 

 

Paris does not glitter, but all in New York was not gold. Her husband’s hand is hot at her back, but _that man_ still lurks, just outside the corner of her eye. His wife ignores him, is barely ever there, and Zelda cannot blame her, comes home to find a husband not her own with her husband, a chair between them and both their hands cinereous with ink. She cries at night, throws open the huge windows of their bedroom and smudges her lipstick until her face is streaked with pink. She has two husbands, and no one loves her.

After that, the decision to throw herself down the stairs is simple, too simple, if she made the shot for honest-- but.

 

 

“Marry me,” he says, for the thirty-sixth time, and she honours him with a smile, says, “I ain’t dyin’ penniless in a New York slum for you or any other boy, Scott.”

“Marry me,” he says, for the thirty-seventh time, and she does not make him go to number thirty-eight.

 

 

“He loves you,” says a man she cannot help but detest, and her cheekbone is split and her hair is wet and her dress is in tatters beneath the Parisian skyline, which has no business being so beautiful when she feels so, so cold, and she says, “He loves you, too.”

He looks at her, long, considering, naked and hungry and it hits her like a bullet to the chest-- she was more than a little wrong in her assumptions.

“Babe,” says H, slinging his arm around her neck, his large, warm hand digging into her collarbone like a brand, “All you had to do was _ask_.”

 

 

She loves New York, feels drunk on it, dances in all the wrong places and kisses her husband’s neck before God and the Law and everybody. He writes and she dances, tries again at ballet, gets up at four in the morning and keeps going until her pink shoes are stained a much, much darker red, and he reads her his novel at night, presses his tongue between her legs, and if he does not call her his muse, it is only because some things do not need to be told.

The public love the book, but, she finds, no one loves it _quite_ as much as that man H.

 

 

Her hair fans out on the pillow, her slip thin and silk and Fitzgerald’s hands drift to finger its hemline, her wet blonde curls, like gravity itself willed him, like he’s powerless.

“She wants this,” says H, and Fitzgerald presses his hand into H’s knee, says, “But do you? Because I’m going to take some convincing, my friend.”

“Can you write without her?” says H, and does not even need to wait for Fitzgerald to shake his head, just closes his hand around the wrist of the hand tangled in Zelda’s glorious hair, says, “Decision made, then. Don’t be slow, now, I know you aren’t, boy.”

“Oh, I don’t know about _that_ ,” says Fitzgerald, but when he looks up, they’re both smiling.

 

 

New York glittered, too, but she saw her failures on every street corner. The sanitorium did not cure her, and her husband writes, and writes, and does not look at her for hours at a time. Her feet are bruised and her hair is slick with sweat, and there are postcards hidden behind the fireguard marked with _H_ in familiar scrawl. They _can’t go on like this, can’t go on like this_ , so Paris, in the end, is little more than that last drink of water before your throat goes dry, and they both know it, oh, do they _ever_.

 

 

“Last time we had this conversation you said you hated me,” says Fitzgerald, and Zelda’s grin is sharp and knowing, replies, “Last time you lied.”

“Last time you said you’d fuck a prostitute to prove you were a man,” says H, already on the bed, his hair untidy and his shirt half-unbuttoned, and Fitzgerald, turns, says, “You ought to write in one of your books that fucking a man makes you that much more masculine.”

“You ought to be quiet and give a girl a show,” says Zelda, and her husband kisses her hand, kisses H, for once gives her exactly what she asked for.

 

 

“The golden girl of the golden age,” whispers her husband, on their wedding day, and her dress is a white lie, her mouth red as roses, and he fucked her that morning and he’ll fuck her that night, and this might be it, might be freedom, might be truth, might be the worst mistake she’ll ever make, but she meets his eyes, straightens his tie, knows that right now-- right now, if she can’t call it fate, she can’t quite call it anything else.

 

 

H fucks like he moves, like he talks, confident and a little desperate, and even when he’s inside her he needs her husband’s encouragement, low and filthy in his ear. They aren’t rougher when they kiss than they are with her, her body is littered with bruises, and she returns them all in kind, and then a little bit more for good luck. They spend hours between her legs, and she comes home to find them naked on her husband’s writing desk, bites dug into her husband’s shoulder and the smallest shadow of shame about H’s eyes.

They fuck her like she’s gold dust, fuck each other like a language she has no interest in learning to speak. Her body does all the talking for her, and if this isn’t happiness, she’ll give it that name and hope, all the same.

 

 

“Our boy,” says H, and he is, if he’s anyone’s, his tie loose and his smile sleek and a whole room hanging on his every word, and when H takes her hand, she lets him dance with her, their bodies pressed close and his desire an unspoken, utterly heard secret, just this once.

 

 

It’s not easy, it’s not even easier, H leaves scars on her and she leaves scars on him, and they both love her husband like something that will kill them, like an infection they aren’t ever going to sweat out. She throws champagne glasses at his head; he sends her poison pen letters dozens of pages long. They fight and they fuck and the whole world watches, does not understand. At night he kisses her while her husband watches, and what happens in that room is love, even if most would call it by another name-- but then, most people are fools who cannot match them, and she knows, as H slips a hand between her legs, and pulls her husband in by his hair, that her boys are not many things, but _in love_ can never, will never, not be one of them.

 

 

“I want you to meet my darling wife,” says her husband, beaming and proud and she doesn’t know if it’s for her or this handsome man who she hates already, “Zelda, this is Ernest Hemingway.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” she says, and offers him a coquettish smile, revels in the heat of his hand in hers, and waits, as she always does, to be asked to dance.


End file.
